A quick-service restaurant provides customers both indoor table service and outdoor drive-thru service. Although a seating area is provided, the quick-service restaurant menu is designed to be ready to be taken away. In addition to taking orders at a front counter inside or outside the restaurant, the drive-thru service can allow customers to order and pick up food from their vehicles. According to a 2012 quick-service restaurant study, the drive-thru service at a quick-service restaurant can account for anywhere between 50 and 70 percent of sales—no small number in a $200 billion industry.
In recent years, unfortunately, the drive-thru operation of a quick-service restaurant appears relatively reduced, and the quick-service restaurant is losing revenue on the drive-thru service due to excessive “dwell time.” In the field of a quick-service restaurant, dwell time is defined as the elapsed time a vehicle remains stationary in the drive-thru lane. Customers of the quick-service restaurant demand fast service. If customers have to wait too long to order, i.e., the dwell time is lengthy, they may drive off and visit a competitor's location. If the drive-thru service of a quick-service restaurant is consistently slow, customers may reject this restaurant in the future.
Technologies have been employed to improve the drive-thru operation of a quick-service restaurant. For example, a hospitality point of sale system is introduced such that kitchen crew people can view orders placed at the front counter or the drive-thru order window in real time. Further, wireless systems implemented in the quick-service restaurant allow orders placed at the drive-thru speakers to be taken by cashiers and cooks. However, to solve the drive off problem of the customers, restaurant personnel currently have to rely on the onsite manager, his/her observation, or hours of motion searches to know when and how often drive offs occur, all of which are very inefficient and inaccurate. There is a need of a system that can provide the quick-service restaurant real time support to solve the drive off problem and improve the drive-thru service. The present invention introduces a method and system to calculate the dwell time of the vehicles entering the drive-thru lane, and provide the quick-service restaurant real time monitoring and instant alert of excessive dwell time.